Tag Archives: Facilities

By Kendra DeKeyrel

IBM TRIRIGA and Cisco have teamed up to give you the tools you need to deploy location sensing using your existing WiFi network infrastructure. This solution helps you scale quickly and get faster, more accurate occupancy insights, to enable you to reimagine and streamline your connected spaces…

With this partnership, IBM TRIRIGA’s IoT and AI-driven insights application, IBM TRIRIGA Building Insights, now natively integrates with Cisco’s DNA Spaces cloud service. If you’re a space planner or manage facilities, you can quickly take advantage of these insights. With a lower cost to entry, you can understand how facilities are being used based on data coming in from an existing network…

If you need to quickly address new occupancy demands, please attend an IBM/Cisco webinar. Designed for space planners and facilities managers, we will explain how true occupancy insights enables you to make strategic space management decisions. Register today.

Join us on May 13 for IBM TRIRIGA Academy

Soon, we’re launching IBM TRIRIGA Academy. This is a new virtual learning platform designed for real estate and facilities professionals who want to create a smarter business. Participate in our sessions, schedule a demo, and interact with subject matter experts…

[Admin: This post is related to the 01.28.20 post about enhancing TRIRIGA UX Perceptive apps with artificial intelligence, and the 03.22.16 post about the former Watson IoT Academy, now moved to the Skills Gateway.]

By Alex Melamed

Wouldn’t it be nice if your office started to act more like a team player? For employees, that would mean effortless engagement with workplace services. For facility managers, that would mean more engaged and delighted occupants who provide feedback to keep the workplace not just humming but evolving.

IBM TRIRIGA just announced numerous enhancements to the workplace experience in the latest release (10.6.1). Among these enhancements, the all new TRIRIGA Assistant. The TRIRIGA Assistant is a smart, conversational A.I. assistant, which is the same frictionless technology that we all have in our homes, and which is another way to meet the ever-growing expectations of the workforce. This A.I. assistant can help users find and reserve meeting rooms, report maintenance issues correctly, and even locate where a colleague sits. And that is just the beginning.

With the introduction of the TRIRIGA Assistant into the facility management portfolio, IBM has invited Watson to the office. The TRIRIGA Assistant is powered by IBM’s Watson Assistant platform. It’s robust and able to be extended to support custom A.I. skills and capabilities within an enterprise-grade secure cloud…

[Admin: Although it’s not an official IBM offering, here’s an intriguing avatar POC demo from the same Assistant team.]

How can I make my facilities even smarter?

By Kendra DeKeyrel

A.I. also helps deliver a more engaging workplace experience. That’s why we included TRIRIGA Assistant in this new release. It’s a smart, conversational A.I. assistant that allows users to engage with the spaces around them. Imagine how much time employees can save by simply asking an app to reserve a conference room, order catering, submit a service request or locate an office. It’s the same frictionless technology that we all have in our homes, and another way to meet the ever-growing expectations of your workforce…

How does the University of California plan to manage their property assets across 10 campuses? By implementing an impressive new program called ICAMP – the Integrated Capital Asset Management Program. We caught up with Rich Powers, of the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) to find out how ICAMP enables visibility and integration across campus systems, and promotes efficient asset lifecycle management, too…

Defining the key elements of ICAMP

The ICAMP solution contains three solutions, all of which come together to support better decision-making:

IBM TRIRIGA Cloud

RSMeans

FieldFLEX Mobile.

UCOP chose the TRIRIGA platform to bring together all of their asset data into one integrated system. TRIRIGA lets you create a building inventory and location hierarchy. It has the capabilities required to manage those buildings throughout their lifecycle. Crucially, it supports facility condition assessment, or FCA. This is how they access every building component, from floor to ceiling, for health and performance. By using TRIRIGA, Rich’s team can overlay their building inventory with the FCA data to see which assets are most at risk, or in need of maintenance.

By combining this information with industry data from RSMeans, the team is able to estimate potential repair costs, then kick off opportunities from within TRIRIGA. UCOP also built a mobile FCA application with FieldFLEX Mobile that makes TRIRIGA available to technicians in the field. This carries the advantage of a streamlined inspection and assessment process. It allows architectural, electrical, and mechanical inspectors to look at their respective inventory elements and access asset data with ease. The application supports storing floor plans, uploading photos and videos, geo-tagging buildings and assets, and cross-referencing lifecycle data to help inspectors make better real-time assessments across the portfolio…

On July 31, 2018, industrial technology solutions giant Fortive announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Accruent, a real estate and facilities management software provider, from private equity firm Genstar Capital. Fortive will pay $2 billion in cash and expects Accruent to generate revenues of $270 million in 2018. This will come from its suite of software products used by Accruent’s 10,000 customers. Upon completion of the acquisition, Accruent will become part of Fortive’s portfolio of Field Services solutions alongside other brands such as Fluke, Gordian (RSMeans), and Industrial Scientific. Verdantix finds this is the biggest deal to date in the $4.9 billion market for real estate and building management software, which we define further in our recent report…

What does the deal mean for the broader real estate and building management software market? The deal shows the market is consolidating at a rapid rate. The largest real estate software vendors MRI, RealPage and Yardi have been locked in an arms race of acquisitions to further bolster their scale. Meanwhile, IWMS vendor Planon has pursued targeted acquisitions to support international expansion. This latest deal also highlights the emerging push by software vendors to make greater linkages between software used during the construction and operational phases of buildings. Witness Elecosoft, a construction software provider, acquiring Shire Systems, a CMMS vendor, to offer the construction firms and property investors it engages with a maintenance management solution…

[Admin: This post is related to the 08.01.16 post about CAFM, CMMS, EAM, and IWMS competitors. To see other related posts, use the Verdantix tag or Accruent tag.]

Organisations and more specifically, their facility and real estate managers are constantly looking to improve our work environment and the buildings that we work in. They want to be cost-efficient, increase productivity, and create a healthy and attractive workplace for their employees.

The Internet of Things and Smart Buildings are providing interesting opportunities to improve our work environments. Achieving this, however, is a big challenge for organisations. What Smart Building solutions are organisations looking for? What is the real value to organisations? How will organisations realise these benefits?

From a reactive to a proactive approach through “machine learning”

The ability of buildings to measure every action or change in behaviour by the building or its occupants is changing rapidly. Nowadays, affordable sensors are available that measure for example space occupancy, air quality, usage of specific spaces or the state of building installations. Data collected from these sensors provides information about these items. We can use this data to make improvements to the work environment, building or user experience.

For example, when sensor measurements show that a meeting room that was reserved is actually not in use, it can immediately become available for a new meeting. In addition, when sensor measurements show that a specific toilet area is used less than expected, the cleaning schedule can be adjusted. However, these useful examples are based on an “If This Then That” scenario, meaning that if an event occurs we react to that event. This is a reactive approach rather than a proactive approach, so can we really call this “smart”?

[Admin: This post is related to the 11.01.17 post about designing smarter buildings that learn. To see other related posts, use the Planon tag or Smart Buildings tag.]

Revit models constructed for the purposes of fabrication, coordination and as-built conditions are typically not going to function well in a facilities environment if they are used “as is.” It’s important for AEC service providers and consultants to understand their customer needs. Chuck Mies from Autodesk sums this up best by posing the following three questions that you should be asking a building owner if they intend to use a Revit model for facilities management:

Who on the facilities team is going to use the data?

What data is going to be collected during the AEC process for future FM purposes, and how?

How will it be maintained once operations begin?

By asking these questions and engaging a building owner you can have greater confidence that a Revit model turned over for the purposes of FM will be more successful and actually used during operations. I also recommend that you ask your customer to really think about what data is critical and who in their facilities team will be responsible for maintaining the information once the model is turned over. This will ensure that you don’t over model or provide excessive detail in equipment families that are not critical and will be difficult for a facilities team to maintain…

FieldFLEX, the leading developer of mobile enterprise software for corporate real estate and workplace management, announced they will be releasing a premier mobile application designed specifically for facilities engineers and inspectors to gather asset data, perform asset condition audits, and estimate repair and replacement costs. The mobile app will allow organizations to rapidly collect and establish accurate asset records, support sustainable funding models, make critical decisions in a shorter time, and feed data directly into the capital planning and operational process…

The FieldFLEX FCA application is fully integrated with the FieldFLEX mobile platform and offers organizations a flexible, highly-scalable, IoT-enabled mobile solution that provides opportunities to reduce costs and risks. The FieldFLEX mobile platform builds a culture of engagement by connecting mobile employees with their workplace for real-time interaction. The suite of mobile enterprise productivity apps includes asset tracking and logistics, and field operations such as inspections, facility assessments and surveys. Compatible with iOS, Android, and Windows, FieldFLEX apps seamlessly integrate with the enterprise IWMS.